


my empire of dirt

by orphan_account



Category: Homestuck, X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Alternate Universe - Trolls as Mutants, Drinking, Gen, Post Beach Divorce, Sollux as a technopath probably, Vriska as a telepath, Vriska being a bitch, but what else is new
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-26
Updated: 2012-06-26
Packaged: 2017-11-08 14:30:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,063
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/444192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The attempt to recruit Vriska into the Brotherhood really could have been better planned. For one thing, they sent <i>Sollux</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	my empire of dirt

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the song Hurt by Nine Inch Nails or, my favorite version, Johnny Cash.  
> Bible quote from the Cambridge edition of the King James Bible.

The couple to her right are feeding each other peanuts. They're laughing softly to each other. 

Vriska licks her teeth at the cloying bitterness she can taste in them. The woman is thinking about his money. He loves her like he's never loved a woman before and he knows all about what she wants. His sadness makes her order another vodka with cranberries. She likes the color. 

Vodka for sadness. Rum for lust. Wine for bitterness. Absinthe to forget it all over again. 

A liqueur for every occasion and for every occasion a liqueur. 

She sniggers. 

And then she falls over. 

The woman sitting to her left props her up without noticing that she's doing so. Vriska nudges herself back on her stool and turns to look at the mind that has burst into hers like a swarm of bees, like only another mutant can. 

He's skinny and young, she notes, barely her age, if that. That's all she cares of his appearance, before she shuffles his thoughts like playing cards to confuse him for the necessary moment to slip inside. 

There's a burst of – _redbluecold - datainputprocessingoutput_ – that pulses cold and steady against her senses like a drumbeat. She recognizes it with a tilt of her head, the only concession to the buzzing he sets off in her skull. 

She edges farther in, the thinnest of razors so he doesn't feel it yet. 

He's sending off purpose like a sparkler. Vriska drowns her disapproval in another shot of vodka and let's him see her. 

When he takes too long to notice her she gives him the psychic equivalent of a sarcastic poke. 

He jumps and sees her. She rolls her eyes. Before he reaches her she runs a bored thought through his memories for trauma to exploit if needed. 

He's broken, in the quiet tragic way that everyone is broken in eventually. The familiar fault lines that ripple like a map she's known her entire life under her fingertips. Bitter, like gunmetal and salt on her tongue. 

Loss. It never changed. 

She thinks, every time she finds a new mind with the old scars, that every one was a holocaust, that the fact that everyone was wounded thus was _no excuse_. 

She grins like a manic shark. 

“Vriska Serket?” 

“Hey, sugar.” The epithet rolls off her tongue and feels foreign, mannerisms borrowed from the woman nursing a martini at the end of the bar. Sollux grimaces at it but his thoughts don't reach his mouth. 

“I'm Sollux. Sollux Captor.” 

“I know who you are.” She has a wink ready, the woman's desperation like candyfloss clogging up her brain. Sollux's irritation goes off like a flare. _Business and not pleasure then_. She shakes the woman off like so much water. 

Time to be herself. She needs another drink. Regretfully she looks at the glass on the bar. Dry as a bone. 

She turns back to Sollux's impatience – _a hot, long drive up and then a search through_ six _bars_ – and grins her shark's grin. 

“Have you ever killed a man?” she asks, lolling, reading the – _coldheartedbitch_ – that is his response. 

“Yeah.” He replies shortly. He knows better than to lie to a telepath, good boy. There's a flash of – _nononotAradiaAradiaAradia_ – that she has to flick her hand to distract herself from. There is dark pain there, in hot red anguish and cold blue despair. 

“Accidentally.” She supplies noncommittally, only grinning brighter when he turns his scowl on her. “Doesn't really count.” 

“Stop digging around in my head.” He doesn't really mean it, knows she can stop it about as easily as she can stop breathing. She doesn't begrudge him the comfort of the words. 

“What do you want then, disco-prince?” 

She's not nearly drunk enough to drown out his surge of fervor, optimism. It's an open flame in her mind, lighting up places she doesn't really like to feel anymore. 

Secondhand sadness, sloppy seconds of emotions slipping thorough her brain, she breathes in hate from the man pacing the room above her head until she's clean of anything like herself again. She _hates_ optimism. 

“Join our cause. Rights for mutants. We could use someone like you.” 

There's a man in his thoughts ringed in idolatry like a fucking halo. The taste of ozone and metal around him makes her sick. _Magneto_ , Sollux's mind whispers to her. She hates the the sight of him. 

She didn't have anyone around her with the patience to deal with these games. 

“You have a psychic already, doll.” She gestures at the bartender, rather rudely. He tops her drink up, used to it. 

The psychic shimmers like diamond in his mind. _Odd_. And the impression of power. She doesn't care. 

“We welcome-” The rest of his speech unfurls behind her eyes like the Times Square advertisements – _a welcome place for every mutant, a place of brotherhood and acceptance_ – and she doesn't have the patience for that either. 

“Don't lie to me.” she whispers, and she turns her razor in his mind until it's cutting off his pulsing thoughts at the waist, synapses scattering and skittering under her skin like electric ants. 

He collapses to his bony knees and she feels the impact. Nobody in the bar is capable of noticing, not with her spiderweb behind every set of optical nerves. 

“I will be nobody's tool.” she whispers to his drooling face. Then she sets to the work of conception. There's a Catholic in the corner that finds himself repeating the story of creation to his beer. _And on the seventh day God ended his work which he had made; and he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made_.

“Genesis 2:2.” Vriska whispered from Sollux's mouth. She leaves behind the memory of finding her weak, and a drunkard, and intractable. It rang true, and The Brotherhood's diamond bitch of a psychic would never know otherwise. 

The last thing she does is find him hiding in his own head and set the steady pulse out again. The simile forming in her thoughts sends up a return echo from him with an equation she doesn't understand. Sine waves. She snorts. 

She gives him a gift before he stumbles out to crystallize the false memories. She touches his memories of Aradia with gentleness. Removes just a little of the guilt. 

It's not like she's fucking _heartless_.


End file.
